Case Number 18098

THE GREEN BERETS (BLU-RAY)

The Charge

So you don't believe in glory. And heroes are out of style. And they don't
blow bugles anymore. So take another look -- at the special forces in a special
kind of hell.

Opening Statement

"Silver wings upon their chest These are men, America's best
One hundred men we'll test today But only three will win Green
Beret."

Facts of the Case

Effete, liberal journalist George Beckworth (David Janssen, The
Fugitive) gets greenlit to go to an army base in South Vietnam to see for
himself what's "really" happening over there. Beckworth's readers
apparently have their doubts about the US involvement in the Vietnam conflict,
and Beckworth's mission is to prove those nay-sayers right.

To the relief of every hawk in the Western Hemisphere, Beckworth finds
himself at "Dodge City," a Special Forces camp run by Col. Mike Kirby
(John Wayne, True Grit) of the elite Green Berets. While Beckworth
cynically tries to tear down everything these colorful and dedicated guys stand
for, he finds himself being swayed by their bravery and acts of kindness in this
place of madness.

And when the base is under attack, Beckworth finds himself pitching in like
any good soldier would.

The Evidence

The Green Berets might be one of the most inept war films ever made.
John Wayne co-directed with Ray Kellogg (The Giant Gila Monster) and,
apparently, an uncredited assist from old-time studio stalwart Mervyn LeRoy
(Random Harvest). The sensibilities here are clearly jingoistic '40s
heroics, anachronistic, and intentionally or not, condescending. This is Wayne's
war, and the film is Wayne's pulpit -- he opens with a press conference, in
which all those doubts about US involvement are handily dispatched by a couple
of Berets so beefy and sincere, you feel lily-livered just watching their
clear-eyed, steely, and simplistic explanations.

The decision to make a pro-war film at that point in history is only
wrongheaded insofar as one's own belief about the conflict. Wayne's ideological
flaw is less his politics than his refusal to recognize any of the complexities
of the situation. The Green Berets was the first major studio release to
address Vietnam, and rather than approach the material with anything resembling
nuance, Wayne steamrolls through a series of clichés and turgid plot
devices that make the honorable Berets seem more like superheroic good ol' boys
than flesh-and-blood fighting men. His contempt for dissenting opinions on the
matter is summed up in a line so inflammatory that the actor practically drools
when he delivers it: "Out here, due process is a bullet."

Wayne, of course, did not shoot this epic in Southeast Asia, but rather in
Southeast Georgia, whose topography is as similar to 'nam as the Rockefeller
Center Ice Rink is to Antarctica. It gives the enterprise a decidedly phony
sheen, but that's fine, since this is a decidedly phony movie.

The film is so far afield from anything remotely resembling the Vietnam
experience as it's been recounted that you have to believe Wayne planned it this
way. The soldiers are not apple-cheeked teens drafted into a service for which
they're ill prepared, but guys in their 30s and above -- yes, this is about an
"elite force," but these guys look closer to the age when men retire
from the military. Speaking of the draft...well, actually no one speaks of the
draft. It just doesn't come up. In Wayne's world, this looks like an
all-volunteer army, with the protagonists driven by a sense of duty for their
country rather than a legal obligation to serve.

While at odds with the concerns with much of the country, Wayne could have
still made a stirring statement on valor and a pointed rebuttal to the shameful
and derisive ways in which returning soldiers were often treated. Unfortunately,
this film is a mess. Wayne's idea to humanize the soldiers is laudable, but he
fails to present the men as multi-dimensional human beings. The script by James
Lee Barrett (Smokey and the Bandit) offers up characters that were
hackneyed decades before. Among the stereotypes, we get the charming slacker con
man (Jim Hutton, Hellfighters), whose heart is opened by a plucky
Vietnamese orphan named Hamchunk; the sensitive, dedicated medic (Raymond St.
Jacques, Cotton Comes to Harlem), who's also one of the few African
Americans here; and the fierce and nobly ruthless South Vietnamese captain
(played by Japanese American George Takei, who missed Star Trek's seminal
"Trouble with Tribbles" episode because he was making this); plus the
expected assortment of oddballs, straight-arrows, and the quiet, philosophical
one who talks a lot about dying, positioning him as the guy with whom you should
avoid making long-range plans.

For an action movie, there's surprisingly little action. The obscenely
bloated 140-minutes-and-change running time is padded with expository scenes of
soldiers setting up the base while things are explained in jargony military
talk. We get what's going on, but we're never quite clear why it's going on. To
spare you forgetting that this is, at its heart, a pro-war propaganda piece,
every few minutes, someone -- Wayne, a soldier, a stray orphan -- says or does
something that humbles milquetoasty reporter Janssen.

At about mid-point, everything grinds to a halt while the soldiers survey
the aftermath of a massacre at a friendly village, and Wayne recounts a
horrifying list of Commie atrocities to newly patriotic reporter. This sequence,
with its descriptions as gruesome as anything Tom Dooley wrote in The Night
They Burned the Mountain, along with a fairly bloody battle -- albeit, with
blood so red it looks like the causalities were the result of a fingerpainting
rampage -- make me wonder how this thing was awarded a G rating. The battle
itself is confusingly shot and edited; it fails as an action sequence, as a
depiction of the horrors of war, and as an example of cohesive filmmaking.

As bad as the first two-thirds are, it's the final act that takes The
Green Berets into the netherworld of cinematic sideshow. Up to this point,
Wayne has presented a bad yet standard war movie that's trying to get the
country to reconsider the war effort. Fine. But then, Wayne sends his troops on
a bizarre, pre-adolescent-boy fantasy mission to capture an enemy general. Their
trump card? A foxy Vietnamese singer (Irene Tsu, Airport 1975) whose own
family was slaughtered on orders of this self-same Commie bastard. Apparently,
on those nights when the general gets lucky, everything else goes slack around
his "heavily guarded" fortress, since our Berets have virtually no
trouble picking off a handful of enemy soldiers and whisking the general away in
the trunk of a car. I'll leave it to you to be astounded by how they actually
get him out of the area into the arms of justice.

Frankly, this sequence is inexcusable, pulverizing any notions Wayne could
have had that he was making an honest or honorable film, and certainly
shattering any pretense that this might be a definitive statement on the war.
This would have been an idiotic interlude in the most jaded WW2 propaganda film,
and 20-plus years later, it's just appalling, a testament to just how out of
touch the Duke was on the subject of Vietnam.

The transfer here looks very, very good, clear and overall sharp. The Dolby
True Audio is crisp and well serves Miklos Rosza's rousing, if dated (even at
the time), score, though it's a bit thin during the battle scenes. Besides a
trailer, the lone extra is a puffy, seven-minute, "behind-the-scenes"
EPK featurette lauding Wayne, the project, and the Berets.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Blu-rays don't come cheap. This one carries a suggested retail price near
$30, while you could pick up the old standard DVD for under a sawbuck. I'm sure
the picture here is much better than the old DVD, but it didn't blow me away to
the point that I'd spend four or five times more to own it.

The draw here, I would think, isn't just the new technology, but the chance
to incorporate new bonus material and create a more meaningful package.
"Meaningful" might seem an odd word to describe Wayne's bloated and
absurd Vietnam fantasy, but while The Green Berets fails on almost every
level as moviemaking, politically and socially, it's a significant film.
Critically assailed at the time -- often with outrage aimed at the message as
much as the filmmaking -- it would certainly be interesting to see how
contemporary critics and filmmakers view it. I'd love to hear Quentin Tarantino
and Michael Bay talk about it, and wouldn't it be great to hear Francis Ford
Coppola and John Milius, director and writer of that other landmark Vietnam film
offer up some insights? Maybe a featurette on the real Berets or some background
on a war that lots of people are too young to remember would have been helpful.
Also, it would have been interesting to note that the film's release in summer
of 1968 came just months after a pair of events that helped fuel the country's
divide on the war: The Tet Offensive in January 1968, and the My Lai Massacre
that March.

The Green Berets is also one of the few films of its time to attempt
to present the soldiers with humanity. "Crazed Vietnam vet" became an
axiom before the US had pulled out of the conflict, and the representative war
films of the '70s -- The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse
Now -- only added to this view, while soldiers-as-civilians were folks like
Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), and the more sympathetic but no less insane
John Rambo. Comments from actual vets would have offered some context and made
this a compelling buy. As it stands, it's just another catalogue title pushed
into the Blu-ray market.

Closing Statement

I thought I'd be watching one of the great "bad movies," but all I
got was this sad, slow piece of propaganda. Wayne's attempt at making an effort
and swaying the hearts and minds of the American moviegoing public fails with a
fizzle, not with a bang, but a whimper. For fans and the curious only.